Man Crazy

By Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

Fresh from the triumph of the bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys , Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and the possibilities of human redemption. At five, Ingrid Boone loves her father with all the innocence and blind trust of childhood--until he abandons her and her beautiful young mother in the wake of a violent crime. Desperate to recapture his lost love and hungry for any kind of mercy at a man's hand, Ingrid allows boys and men to abuse her as she searches for affection in the alcohol, drugs, and sex they offer. When she is targeted as prey by a charismatic leader of a violent cult, Ingrid falls to her blackest moment of despair--yet it is here that she finds unexpected salvation and the will to reclaim her life and heart from the men who have taken it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452277248
• ISBN13: 9780452277243
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Plume Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Jumping the gun

I've only begun the book. I'm intrigued, but not by story line. I'm giving it five stars 'cause it's book that has caught my attention regarding writing ability/style/brains. Ah, there's the rub. Who's to know anymore if it's the author, publisher, software program or editor that has done the trick?My childhood friend has had four books published using a standard CD program for writing. What? I'm still hoping nobody played with Poe's words. And many others of course...........

The Degradation of Dog-Girl

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our best chroniclers of degradation. In MAN CRAZY, she examines what it took to be a female camp follower of someone like Charles Manson (here named Enoch Skaggs and relocated to Upstate New York). Ingrid Boone grows up the daughter of a former aviator on the run and a good-time girl named Chloe who supplements her earnings by accepting money from well-off men who are "separated" from their wives. Even before the onset of puberty, Ingrid feels she must win approbation by offering sexual favors to the boys in her school. It is only a small step from there to becoming "Dog-Girl" for the sadistic Skaggs and his gang. The scenes with Skaggs's gang take a strong stomach to read through, as a "traitor" named Gem is put to death by Enoch and as Ingrid is passed around from man to man and "punished" by being thrown naked into a cellar overflowing with rubbish and feces. There is enough will to live (but only just) for her to escape and find help after having been locked in there for days.Oates is brilliant at showing us what horrors can lie behind the bland face of the pretty clerk who takes our applications or the receptionist who answers the phone and puts us on hold. The book ends with a now "rehabilitated" Ingrid looking at trees felled by a storm:"They were alive, only not vertical. The heartbeat inside them had maybe slowed, only a murmur but if you squatted to listen, if you knew how to listen, if the wind would die down you would hear it."

Women! Read This Book!

Though many women cannot relate to this book at all, guess what? Many of us can; if not in it's whole context...bits and pieces are there that sling arrows through our memories and our hearts.Personally, I have never experienced the satantic cult side..I have experienced the rest. You must read this book. It's very dark, but most excellent!

disturbing...lucid

After reading Man Crazy, I had no idea how to react. It cut so deeply into a reality that few would understand, unless they themselves were victims of brain-washing. The main character, Ingrid, is particularly well-developed, along with Skaggs (cult-leader and Satan incarnate). In turn, you see into the twisted mind of the entire group of people, where love is pain and respect is sadomasochistic mind-games. Comming from a broken family, Ingrid's life is a downward spiral. She has nothing to live for, but (reluctantly) realizes that her life is more inportant then Skaggs would have her believe. That realization is the true act of heroism, reflecting an intensity immanent throughout the novel.